ATTi at the Lone Star Ruby Conference

As we mentioned last month, the third annual Lone Star Ruby Conference (LSRC) was held in Austin, TX Aug. 27-29 – - -and we were there to hear from some of the industry’s best. LSRC 2009 offered a full day of advanced training on Thursday Aug 27th in addition to the two days of Ruby-packed, dual-track speaking sessions on Friday the 28th and Saturday the 29th.

As a sponsor of the event, those of us from AT&T Interactive who attended were proud and excited to have a presence at this community driven conference. As you probably know, Ruby is not only important to the larger world of software development but to our technology team here at AT&T Interactive as well.

ATTi sent Coby Randquist, Josh Kleinpeter and Alf Mikula (from product development)and Danny Blitz (marketing) to this fantastic event.

Back again was the author of Ruby, Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. “MATZ”). This was an opportunity to ask him questions, and just hang out for a few days with one of the most influential language designers in the industry. What a terrific guy.
Matz was asked in the Q&A on Saturday; “How do you measure the success of Ruby?”.
Matz answer was “I invented Ruby to make programmers happy. If programmers are happy, I am happy.”
A true gentleman.

Intermediate and Advanced Ruby craftsmanship classes were taught by the extremely talented Gregory Brown and Brad Ediger. The room was packed.

Corey Donohoe chain-sawed through over 200 slides about software process in under 40 minutes. Heads were spinning – but he was great.

Some other topics covered at the show include:
Advanced Databases with Ruby
Advanced Testing with Ruby
Advanced Web Frameworks with Ruby
Ruby and Cloud Computing
Ruby Meta Programming
Software Management

There was a great deal of instruction on testing. Very important.

If you attended this year’s show let us know your thoughts on your favorite show moment or speaker.

–Danny Blitz
AT&T Interactive